Using Co-Citations & Co-Occurence For Shopify SEO

Below is a video I recorded on the topic above. Below that is a transcription of the video. It's probably just easier to watch the video....

Hi guys, Jono here from EcomXSEO.

So, co-citation and co-occurrence for Shopify stores or Shopify SEO. What is it? Can we utilize it? And does it work? If you haven't subscribed to our YouTube channel yet, make sure you hit the subscribe button below and you can also join our private Facebook group, where I've got a lot of good discussion going on over there about Shopify SEO. Okay. So, co-citation and co-occurrence, if you're new to SEO, even if you've been around SEO a while, it's probably one of those terms you haven't really considered a lot. It is generally used by more experienced and high-level SEOs. And also, it's been one of those things that's been difficult to implement.

You could do it in the past and I'll get to what it is in a second, but you could do it in the past with certain tools, and those tools have now been made defunct and even those tools were difficult to use. So, it's one of those implementations, from an SEO point of view, that can be really, really powerful, but you just need the right tools and you also need to understand how to do it.

Now, it also became popular a couple of years ago, and then it diminished a bit in its popularity. And I don't hear a lot about it on forums or groups currently, although I know some of the real top guys still use it a lot, because it's so powerful. We've used it in the past, certainly with our WordPress stores, our local SEO clients and our local SEO sites and it works really well, but as I said, to do it properly and to do it manually, was a hell of a lot of grunt work and took a lot of time.

And it was one of those things where you weighed up the return value you get from it and how much work is put into it, when you could be doing other things that might get the same benefit. But there's ways and means of doing it now, which are much easier, much faster and cheaper. So, first of all, look at co-occurrence. So, what's co-occurrence? So, it's one of those things where Google probably hasn't really admitted that that's what happens, but there's a lot of evidence out there that suggests and it was brought up in 2012, I think by Rand Fishkin of Moz at that time, that he predicted that it would become more important and also that it was happening.

So, co-occurrence is essentially where, if your brand is mentioned on a webpage with another site or another page, and it doesn't even have to be a link pointing to you or the other page, let's say your new product or your new store that's been launched is mentioned in the same breath, for lack of a better word, with a very big, established, branded store in your market. That co-occurrence, where there's not even a link between it and there's a proximity to the mention, because it's on the page, is what's called co-occurrence. So, it's what is known as implied links, and you can see up here, that's what they're talking about here. And you sometimes hear people talk about brand mentions and that can help as well.

So, then we look at co-citation because co-occurrence and co-citation work hand-in-hand, and a lot of the time they'll happen together anyway. So, co-citation is where you actually do have a link, but let's say we are site B, so that would be our site that we're trying to improve performance and site A might be just a standard blog post. As long as it's healthy, it might not even be a really powerful site in its own right, but in its content, it's talking about site C, which might be a really high domain authority, powerful site, on a topic, and you want it to be relevant to your topic. So, with all this, we're thinking about topical relevance. So, again, if in your market, if site C is a really powerful site, branded site, gets a lot of traffic itself, have got good domain authority or domain rating and it's in your market.

If there's a link on site A talking about site C and on site A there's a link pointing to your site, also talking about your site, again, in the same breath, then that's what a co-citation is. And essentially, you can start to piggyback off of the domain authority of site C, so it's almost as if that link juice or domain authority will flow backwards. And there are a few people talking about that can actually happen where link juice or domain authority can actually flow backwards. So, what can start to happen is, once you to do this in the right way and do it enough, you'll start to see the domain authority or the page authority of site B, which is your site, increase over time. So, you can start to consider how time consuming it could be. A lot of blogger outreach or outreach link building is so much grunt work in itself and then you're trying to target sites where you can get this co-citation happening.

It can be quite difficult and a struggle, but if you can outreach to a blogger in your market, which has topical relevance and the site has relevance, and then they not only link out when they're creating an article for you, they're not only linking out to your site, but also linking out to an authority site. And that's what's known as externally linking out to an authority site, so you get this co-citation happening. Now, the benefit of this sort of thing is you can improve authority and then consequently rankings of your pages or your blog posts, however you're doing it, really quite quickly, a lot quicker than link building if it's done in the right way. Now, like I said before, still a lot of people do this with their WordPress sites and there are some tools out there that help to do that plugins, et cetera, but I haven't come across anyone who's doing it with Shopify, Shopify SEO.

And what we'd like to do, as you know, is delve a little bit deeper into the mechanics and the dynamics of how, specifically SEO, works with Shopify. And also, the other thing is, when you're doing this, it's mainly done on blog posts, for example, which a lot of WordPress sites are on. Whereas we have our products pages, we have our collection pages. You might have a blog as well on your Shopify store. We build our relevance on our collection pages. So, if we were going to do this, we would want to help improve our collection pages, just as much as we'd want to improve our product pages or our blog posts, for example.

So, that's essentially the concept and we know the concept works, but does it work with Shopify? Well, all I can say at the moment is we're testing it. We have found a method with a specific tool, but tweaked it a little bit to work with Shopify because it doesn't work natively with Shopify. So, we've been able to delve a little bit deeper into that, get it working. We've got tests running at the moment. It is so super simple, easy to use, that if it works, it's a bit of a game changer for the Shopify SEO. So, I'll keep everyone posted.

It'll probably, if we do see really good results, it's probably only going to be released in Shopify SEOX version two, because if it does work it means it's incredibly powerful. So, we just need to be fair to the people that are in ShopifyX SEO, but I'll also keep everyone updated that, if the process and the concept is actually working, at least. And also, if it doesn't or if there's any problems, so. Okay. I hope all that makes sense. Just wanted to update everyone on that and we'll see in the you next video. Thanks.


Insert your tweetable quote/phrase here

Click to Tweet

Leave a Comment